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Friday, June 20, 2008

Now they're the "far left"

Simon Owens has written up a summary of the Strange Bedfellows coalition of right/left* civil libertarians that has formed to fight telecom amnesty and other Constitutional violations that are taking place in a "bipartisan" manner (i.e. Republicans break the law and then Democrats capitulate and legalize the law-breaking.)

In the comment section of this post today by Glenn Greenwald exploring how key Democratic leaders define "bipartisan" as capitulating to Republican lawlessness I noted that the center of American political discourse is continually redefined as the halfway point between movement conservative ideologues and non-ideologues.** It in this manner that opposing the give-away of our Bill of Rights protections for the sake of granting legal imunity to the telecoms that have purchased such a give-away from members of Congress by throwing money at them becomes a "far left" position.

*I hate using left/right convention but for the sake of expediancy I'm using it to convey the point.**In this instance, the new "center" consists of agreeing to legislate the President's lawlessness rather than just letting him do it without approval.